Thursday, October 11, 2007

Chernobyl Countryside

My latest rendering. This is a rather dismal picture, but I enjoy a bit of desolation (in art) now and then. It seems fitting, with Halloween coming up. The towers pictured are actually all the #4 tower from Chernobyl. Also of note is the angle of the "camera" in this image. At least in the last four or five years, I haven't done many renderings that had the camera pointed upwards.

But I don't have any plans to give up my art hobby any time soon, either. With art as a hobby, I can have flashes of inspiration every few months, and create some cool stuff. That's been working pretty well for me for about a decade now.

As a commercial job, though, I think I'd be lost as an artist. I'm not very purposeful in what I create, and I just kind of work on a piece until it looks the way I like. Whenever I sit down and try to create a specific scene, it never comes out quite the way I want. Usually I'm able to make it come out cool, if different, though.

In the case of this rendering, I went into it knowing that I wanted a sky-shot that was looking up over the trees. I was originally thinking of an autumnal cerulean sky, something along the lines of what we see in NC around this time of year.

But once I had the trees in place, it just didn't look the way I wanted, so I wound up adding the towers since something was missing. Once those were in place, of course, I knew I had to have something darker. I was originally just going to go with stormy or dusky, but I wound up going with the smoggy look after much experimentation.

So, yeah, I can create cool things on occasion, but it's not a skill I have a whole lot of control over. In some senses, I'm a lot more like a photographer than a painter or sculptor. The good news is that I can exercise a lot more control over my art than a photographer (most of the time).

I could go on and on about this (and arguably, I already have), but I think you get the idea!